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17.07.2012 Feature Article

GHANA : THE SURE PATH FORWARD

GHANA : THE SURE PATH FORWARD
17.07.2012 LISTEN

In keeping with globally progressive trends and in pursuance of re-inventing the nation into a 21st Century one (The 21st Century New Ghana), our sharp focus as a nation should be on :

1. Putting in place visionary, competent, effective, credible, responsible, determined and achieving leadership with the necessary drive and dare

2. Radical comprehensive restructuring of our education system for delivery of relevant quality education to forcefully drive a rapid transformation agenda

3. Major restructuring of our economy to facilitate value addition through modern industrialization, expanded entrepreneurial activity premised on capacity building, and redirection of effective control of a major part of economy to Indigenous Ghanaians.

4. Stimulating domestic demand for Ghanaian made products

5. Develop our free zone into a globally acclaimed processing and manufacturing as well as a West African warehousing, re-export and ICT hub

6. Putting into high gear, the export drive into West Africa

7. Strategically positioning our youth to cream in from the global ICT economy

8. Leveraging our fairly successful democratic situation and strategic geo-political positioning to establish ourselves as the West African financial and medical services centre

9. Pursuing the creation of smaller cluster (3 country) ECOWAS free trade areas

10. Developing Central Region into an educational enclave for extended campuses of credible institutions of higher learning in USA and Europe so that Arabs, Asians and Africans restricted from securing entry visas into those nations, can school here

11. Products, Services and Human resource export to the world based on thoroughly researched comparative analysis and a precise determination of our core competency (competitive speciality)

12. Leveraging the collective resourcefulness and resources of Ghanaians in the diaspora as a force for rapid transformation

13. Investing our energies into community focused development

My candid opinion is that our economic development since Dr Kwame Nkrumah exited the “Hot Seat”, has been embarrassingly timid, with wobbly movements of resurrection just within the beginning of the 4th Republic till now. It is time we challenge ourselves to strategically and forcefully break out of this never-ending-cycle of failure, to pursue an ambitious, globally-competitive vision, bold new ideas, and put in place new growth poles as well as effective implementation planning. It is time to unleash our dormant untapped potential to produce and supply the kinds of volumes required to enter major agricultural produce markets around the world, and provide an alternative to some industrial products imported into Ghana as well as those imported by other West African countries from around the world. Off course the government of the day has the duty to intentionally stimulate domestic demand for products of our existing and new industrial drive.

When a hungry lion appears in the compound of your high-walled house, and you are faced with a life-threatening challenge, you don't throw your hands up in despair. The dangerous situation should make demands on your untapped, underutilised potential and challenge you to harness energies from within you to scale the high wall you normally would not attempt scaling. In the process of scaling the wall, you could set a new high jump record (a new invention, innovation, value addition). Confronting, engaging and surmounting challenge is interesting and exciting, a culture that must be and remain with us. The naked reality is that, we are endangering ourselves by our “BUSINESS-AS-USUAL conduct in this fast, complex and ever-changing global-spirited world. Urgency should be a daily dose. and may I remind you that the road to failure is paved with mediocrity and excuses. It is time to flush out the slave thinking, excuses, and think through as well as beyond possibility into achieving high targeted results. We must strategically position ourselves as a nation, set up for success and diligently at work to make a better life for itself. We must progress from despair to hope, transform possibility into reality and ideals into facts. We have no choice but to take big decisions about concrete strategic objectives.

“There were four people in a nation named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. The task of nation building was given to them to be done and indeed everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure somebody will do it, but Nobody did it. Anybody could have done it but nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was everybody's task. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done”. The greater responsibility however, rests with GHANA's NEW GENERATION.

We will succeed with a revolutionary change in our mindsets, through new forms of collaborative inventiveness, by acquisition of new competencies, inspirational leadership, and above all, with people who are wiling to implement change at all levels of society. The discussion MUST BEGIN in our homes, communities, societal meetings, schools, work places, on social networks, in the media, within and amongst religious, political as well as business leadership, and it must begin NOW. Yes we can!

Charles Sam, Golden Future Promotions, Accra - Ghana Tel : + 233 244 685689Facebook : "Charles A. Sam Gfp" and "The Change by Forum TalkWorld". Email : [email protected]

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